Their View: Land bank crucial to reducing blight

By Gary W. Anderson, Patrick O’Keefe and Zack Miller

Saturday

Jan 12, 2019 at 9:00 AM

The Winnebago County Board has an important piece of land bank legislation before it Monday night that can have a positive effect on how we deal with vacant and abandoned properties in our neighborhoods. It is not the total answer, but it can have a great impact on a complex struggle we all face. For the past 10 years, we have endured a cruel and paralyzing decline of property values and disinvestment in our residential properties. We have all experienced the decline of quality housing stock in our neighborhoods and the frustration of trying to find out who owns those vacant properties and deteriorating homes that degrade and contribute negativity.

Every neighborhood block has experienced the uncertainty and years and years of not knowing what will happen with a blighted property. We are powerless to find anyone to help, leading our neighbors to hopelessness, disillusionment and distrust of our governmental leaders. What do we expect when we don’t provide the tools to combat a new reality that destroys our housing values? It impacts our safety, creates instability and creates an environment that discourages improvement and investment.

We have subjected ourselves to a perfect storm of destroying our own property values. We have protested our home values by the thousands, we have allowed foreclosed houses to fall into ruin. What does it take for us to recognize that we don’t have the tools to reverse an obvious and scary trend of declining values?

We complain about the high property taxes we all pay, but that is the price we pay when we discourage investment and improvement and allow blight to creep into each of our neighborhoods.

Action is long overdue. We need to change a broken system that is incapable of dealing with the catastrophic impact of abandoned properties in our community. Instead of letting properties with unknown owners sit vacant until they need to be demolished, let’s bring in a tool that combats this dilemma.

We have been a part of the Transform Rockford‘s Great Neighborhoods team initiative to help in revitalizing our residential neighborhoods. To date, we have met with 16 neighborhoods. The overwhelming concern is blight and all the uncertainty that comes with it. No one is immune to the problem. Our neighborhoods need all the help that they can get to combat the blight.

We need our County Board to support the land bank intergovernmental agreement. The primary target is the unmotivated financial institutions and faceless investors that could care less about the condition of properties they acquire and the profiteering off you and me. Last year alone we taxpayers paid out $1 million dollars in error of sales fees to these profiteers for properties they didn’t want. The tax trustee has been operating under the guise of fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility of collecting back taxes. The evidence suggests just the opposite. They have had a hand in being responsible for creating more deteriorated properties, more vacancies, which result in driving down all the adjacent property values.

The land bank concept has proven its value. The National Association of Realtors even states that property that is land banked and revitalized, raises adjacent property values 9 percent. What's not to like about a concept that works all over the country?

We need to take command of our own destiny. We need new tools that can affect change in our neighborhoods. We need to take away the uncertainty of who owns what and provide hope that small investments will lead to more improvements and greater value that results in a very desirable place to live.

Our neighborhoods are filled with owners and tenants that truly love and care for their community and believe that their neighborhood has a future. Our neighborhoods have not benefited from our recovering economy like other communities.

Change can occur. Just look at our revitalized downtown and how it utilized new resources to reinvent itself. It‘s up to our County Board leaders to change course, adopt new tools to fight blight. We need to take control of our own future. Utilizing a land bank improves not only values, but it provides a hopeful future we can invest and believe in.